Dental charts aid the dental practitioner in the systematic diagnosis, tracking, and treatment of teeth and supporting structures. Conventional dental charting is a largely manual process, performed by the dental practitioner with the help of a standardized paper template that allows written annotation related to each tooth to be recorded and stored in the patient's file.
With the increased use of electronic tools for image storage and display, the value of maintaining dental charts as digital data that can be displayed as needed is widely recognized. Various types of dental charting software have been developed, such as the SOFTDENT software from Kodak Dental Systems by Carestream Health.
Refer to U.S. Pat. No. 7,010,153 entitled “Tooth Identification Digital X-Ray Images and Assignment of Information to Digital X-Ray Images” (Zimmerman).
Refer to U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0285636entitled “Dental Image Charting System and Method”(Razzano).
Applicants have recognized that there is a need for automatic tooth charting methods and apparatus that can generate an appropriate dental chart for a particular patient from dental images and populate the generated chart with information obtained from applying automated diagnostics to the tooth image data.